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Writing About Film

Stones Unturned Oliver the Place, but Understandably So

Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986)

Paper for Vietnam and the Cinema class, 1988

Oliver Stone’s Platoon is an extraordinarily realistic
film. Veterans who served in Vietnam — including those in the area “somewhere
near Cambodia” in late 1967 and early 1968 — where the film’s
events take place, agree that Platoon captures the essence of their
experiences to an unprecedented degree. What are Platoon’s
aims that it painstakingly attempts to recreate the events which writer/director
Stone’s
platoon encountered? By all accounts, Stone’s motivations are clear: Platoon is
the result of his struggle to deal with the war and what he witnessed, in
a medium which Stone hopes can make a connection with other veterans.
Additionally, Platoon condemns the futility and criminality of the
war, the result of uncalled-for U.S. intervention in another country’s
affairs.

The title of Time magazine’s
cover story about the film, "Viet Nam as it was, on film,"
[my emphasis] is obviously not literal, if for no other reason than because Platoon is
not a documentary — it is,
at best a recreation of events; and, at worst, a distortion of them. Time’s
editors naturally understood this, the title of their story acknowledging
that cinema is art, after all, and not reality. The cover title may, however,
be a sly
comment
about film audiences, implying that some viewers do confuse film representations
and history, to the point where in their memory the two become interchangeable.
In a significant way, though, the cover, and the article inside, legitimize Platoon,
declaring that it is the authoritative film document of the war. That is
a statement which must be refuted.

Compared to the Vietnam films which
precede it, Platoon achieves remarkable heights in evoking certain
aspects of the war, particularly the physical
rigors to which
the grunts who fought in the jungles were regularly exposed. This “stark
realism” should not be underestimated: besides technical and military details,
Platoon successfully recalls the period’s language and atmosphere,
from
the soldiers' lingo to the slogans on their helmets to the music to which
they listened. Platoon, through the character of Chris,
submits
its audience to many of the most repelling details of a grunt’s life, from
red ants, leeches, and suffocating heat to Army rations, jungle rot, and malaria.
Additionally — and here is where an understanding of the film’s subjectivity
comes into play — Platoon ignores or sidesteps certain other elements
of commonplace grunt life: the nicknames almost all grunts were given, and the
warped,
racist, and cruel humor often employed by the men.

Vietnam was a different reality
for everyone who was there, man and woman, GI and noncom, American and Vietnamese.
Dear America and Platoon successfully demonstrate
that Vietnam could manifest itself differently, in time, within even one person’s
breast: the cherry PFC saw Vietnam worlds differently than the scarred veteran
who walked — or was carried — out just a few short months later.
As previous films display, Vietnam was also a separate reality for those who
were never there
at all: specifically the people behind The Green
Berets, The Deer Hunter,
Apocalypse Now, and Rambo.
Obviously, no single film could encapsulate more than a tiny fraction of those
differing views, and Platoon is strongest when it retains
its personal tone and documents Chris’s (Stone’s romantic alter-ego)
experiences. It is when the story strays into symbolism and allegory that it
loses its drive. This is also when Platoon becomes most dangerous,
as it portrays the whole war itself in a generalized, removed fashion — Barnes'
and Elias’s
struggle for Chris’s soul. For this reason, if no other, there should
be many, many more films (and books, poems, music, art, and so on) about Vietnam,
not only to give solace to the thousands who were touched by the war, but also
to keep films such as Platoon (and works such as Michael Herr’s Dispatches)
from becoming the definitive documents of the war. Platoon only truly
succeeds if it is viewed — by both producers and audience — as
one man’s
interpretation of the Vietnam War.

Platoon works best when it bluntly depicts
the inherently dramatic and horrifying episodes of Stone’s experience — nothing
else is needed to hold a viewer's attention.
In interviews, Stone acknowledges that his platoon actually fought the rainy
forest battle
after the night ambush, but the reversal of events in Platoon is
relatively unimportant:
they are both from Stone’s experience, and, regardless of the order
of their presentation, are not intrinsically symbolic. Since the movie does
not
claim to be a documentary record of specific events, but is rather a forum
for Stone’s emotional release, such minor historical digressions are
relatively innocuous. Platoon loses potency, however, by allegorizing
the battle between
Barnes and Elias: the metaphysical struggle for Chris’s soul, reinforced
by the literary allusions to Melville, lessens the film’s specificity.
Similarly, by concluding Platoon’s narrative with Chris’s
voiceover generalizations, the film’s antiwar tone is lessened. His
reminiscences, instead of reflecting his own limited experiences, elevate
the film’s
message to a supreme comment about all of humankind and its moral duty to
rectify its
mistakes. This is at the expense of Platoon’s strength, which
is its ability to draw viewers into the action so that they see for themselves
why the Vietnam
War was so brutal, scarring, and, ultimately, futile. The symbolic subplot
and the continual allusions to Elias’s resemblance to Jesus Christ
are doubtlessly the outcome of Stone’s insecurity as a writer: his
fear that the movie would not be palatable without the incorporation of a
familiar, grand
theme with
which to resolve the narrative. Unfortunately, the symbolism lessens the
main story’s impact — and its relevance — by weakening
Platoon’s
attack on America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. It would succeed
much better without the added conflicts, and a less resolved ending would
allow viewers
to reach their own conclusions about the film’s message.

Platoon sets
a positive precedent for films of its genre, declaring that movies which
wish to be taken seriously must ascribe to certain realistic
criteria.
Works such as Hamburger Hill and 84 Charlie MoPic more successfully communicate
the war’s futility, as they conclude in either pyrrhic victory or outright
defeat. These films show that there is no final lesson to be learned from
Vietnam other than the understanding that the United States should never
have been there
in any capacity, least of all by sending teenagers into combat 10,000 miles
from their homes.

Similarly, though Platoon spends a significant amount of film-time
with its black characters, its portrayal of the black soldier is rife with
distortions
and stereotypes.
Black soldiers were as courageous as their white counterparts, and they died
in greater proportional numbers. Junior, the most developed black character,
is hateful, cowardly, and foolish, a butt of jokes who spouts Black Panther
rhetoric but hangs out with the platoon’s rednecks. The other major
black character, King, serves to initiate Chris into the underworld, as it
were, where he meets
the other “good” grunts and Elias. An exploration of King and
Junior’s
names is illuminating: the former’s alludes to the nonviolent, consensus-building
figure of Martin Luther King; while by virtue of Junior’s name and
actions, the audience sees that he is not a man, but something less, a minor
among adults.
By typing its main two black characters in such a way, Stone to some extent
dehumanizes all of the film’s blacks. According to Wallace Terry,
Oliver Stone’s platoon was known for its courageous black soldiers,
including a lieutenant who is never shown in Platoon. In any case,
a film with a limited
number of roles for minority characters has an obligation to not distort
an already stereotyped group, whose members arguable gave up the most of
any race
by virtue of their fighting in Vietnam. Time’s cover story
title, by aggrandizing and legitimizing Platoon, affirms that Stone’s
film tells the whole story, for black and white, American and
Vietnamese.
That is just not true.